The present invention relates to the determination of changes in database schema, and more particularly to the use of comparing compressed schemas to determine schema changes.
In a complex data systems there are many different loosely related components bundled together to serve as a software platform. These components include many open source and proprietary software packages. Many of these components have metadata (column names, data types, software types, software versions, etc.) that are typically stored into tables in a database known as the catalog database in the cluster. These metadata tables, known as schema, are fundamental to the operation of these software components.
In a complex environments the metadata schema in the catalog database can become inconsistent with what a software component expects, and causes the component to malfunction. The inconsistency may be caused by accidental change to tables such as table alter, table deletion in the catalog database.